Yanely Marte

4 December 2025                                   Final Reflection

During this semester I learned a lot of new skills and how to use different techniques. English was always one of my favorite subjects in school because you are able to express yourself by writing everything down on a piece of paper and not having to worry about who’s going to judge you. Even though this semester started getting really stressful towards the end I feel like it wasn’t too bad overall. I feel like I was able to learn and practice new skills that I’ve never done before. The use of multimedia was one of them not only that but citations, having to cite sources the proper way. Trying these techniques were a bit difficult at times but they also supported me in writing my cover letter and peer reviewing as well. 

The use of Multimedia was something new for me this semester. I didn’t really know how to use multimedia in my essays but after going over it in class a couple of times I got the hang of it. I was able to use multimedia in different ways as shown in my Synthesis Essay. I was able to use images to elaborate more on the topic of code-switching. Similar to my Synthesis Essay my language and literacy paper was another assignment that I was able to use multimedia on and the images really helped me get my point across and visually show my audience what I was trying to argue. Not only did I use multimedia in my essays but in my translation one and two assignments. This helped me express myself in another way that doesn’t have to do with writing. 

Citing my sources was something that I also improved. Citing is something that I wasn’t always  good at or felt comfortable doing but during this semester I definitely saw an improvement. Especially in my two big writing pieces of this semester, I feel like you can really see how I improved my citation from my first piece, my language and literacy essay vs my citation in my synthesis essay. I had to learn how to cite my sources the proper way and how to cite using the specific format I was using. 

Something that I wasn’t used to and was asked to do was a cover letter. I’ve never done a cover letter in my life so when I was asked to do this I was completely confused. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. But once I was shown what a cover letter was and the proper way to write one I thought to myself  “ok let’s give this a try”.  And that’s when I decided to write my first cover letter on my language and literacy essay. Not knowing whether I was doing it the right way or not I went for it and after writing my first cover letter I felt good. For it being my first cover letter I felt like I did pretty decent and then I was asked to write my second cover letter for my synthesis essay and this time I was a bit more confident. After writing my second cover letter I felt like I accomplished something new once again and it made me more confident as a writer. 

Speaking of feeling confident as a writer, another technique that helped with this was peer review. Back then I never really understood the point of peer review nor did I like it. I felt like most people would just do what they want regardless of you giving advice to them on how to improve their work. But this feeling slowly started changing once I started to peer review in class. I started noticing that the advice I was receiving from my peers was becoming super helpful especially when it came down to editing and revising my drafts. I made sure to keep in mind the feedback that was given to me and used it to improve my writhing. This also helped me improve my communication skills with my peers in class and it made it easier to talk and give advice to others.

Overall this semester was definitely a roller coaster ride with many ups and downs. But I did enjoy taking this course. I learned so many new techniques that I once didn’t know and not only did I get to practice these new techniques but it helped my writing skills improve so much more. This course helped me grow as a writer and as a person overall and I will definitely use everything that I learned in this class for the future.